Neal's Workshop

Many misunderstand anarchy: the consensus is that a society without government would be chaotic and violent. Anarchy is understood to mean "no order." This is incorrect.

Anarchy simply means no government, where government is defined as a predetermined body that regulates society through force. Anarchy is to government-less-ness as atheism is to godlessness. This is a useful analogy as the notion of government is even more deeply linked to the notion of God. Perhaps I can explain.

The assumption that government is necessary is an indictment of human society. The reason for this is that government can only be necessary if human society without government is inadequate on its own. An explanation through example may provide some insight: if human society reaches an efficiency of life/liberty of 90% without government, then we would expect government to improve such efficiency to something close to 100%. If government was equivalent to god, perfection could be attained as the theoretical god-government would not be subject to the inadequacies of human beings that necessitated government in the first place.

Government is not run by a perfect being or perfect beings. As a result, under my assumptions regarding efficiences of human society, human-government could only get society to 99% (90% + [90% x 10%] = 99%). A government on top of a government might get you to 99.9% and so on. As you can see, it would be turtles all the way down. In reality, government is widely run by those who are above the law and society seems to be little better off from the existence of government and arguably much worse off.

So what does any of this have to do with anarchy? And what is the connection between anarchy and atheism? Again, anarchy means no government. Since you cannot have an infinite regression, there must be, at some point, a human-government existing without government: such a singularity would be akin to god. Such a singularity would necessarily be anarchic.

This conclusion begs a critical question: if human-government cannot exist apart from anarchy, why do we need government, at all? Is it just a paradox that government requires anarchy? Why would human society accept such an arbitrary, contradictory explanation? If anarchy is good enough for government, why isn't it good enough for individuals, and thereby, society? Are we better off for replacing decentralized anarchy, whereby power is in the hands of individuals, with politicized anarchy, whereby power is heavily concentrated in the government?

I doubt it seriously.

No Anarchy? Turtles All the Way Down. was inspired by a blog entry I found over on Lew Rockwell that cited an article written by Alfred Cuzan titled, Do We Ever Really Get Out of Anarchy?, an excellent discourse that more thoroughly deals with this concept. I recommend you read it.